New Pontiflex Tool Uses Social Content to Generate Email Follow-Ups for SMBs

Mobile advertising company Pontiflex has launched a new Social FollowUp tool aimed at helping small businesses engage with new leads generated through its AdLeads platform. Social FollowUp pings newly acquired consumers with an auto-generated email that pulls recent content from the business’s existing social media accounts. Think Storify meets MailChimp.

Pontiflex brought its core, mobile sign-up service to the SMB market in March, and has since onboarded over 5,000 small businesses to the service.

One of the big problems facing the mobile advertising ecosystem is that there are not that many mobile-optimized sites among small businesses to which a mobile ad can direct traffic. For Pontiflex, the email generated by the service essentially proxies as a mobile landing page that consumers can access at any time from any device.

The feature is also an important strategic step for the Brooklyn-based company insomuch as it helps build value for the startup’s core lead generation product by helping businesses maximize the long-term value of a lead without asking the business owner to invest additional effort.

“What we realized really quickly was that mobile ads are great, but they are only as good as the engagement after the impression — especially for small businesses,” Zephrin Lasker, Pontiflex’s CEO told Street Fight. “We realized that you have to do both mobile acquisition piece and the social engagement piece in order for it to work for small and medium-sized business.”

This realization – the idea that lead generation and retention are interdependent – is causing serious fragmentation across the hyperlocal ecosystem as business, which were once lead generation or loyalty companies, are racing to integrate across the value chain. With Pontiflex, Laskin says he is content to partner where others look to build: “I think everyone’s starting to drown in platforms, and content and data – and that’s been going on for a while,” he said. “But the fact is, if you don’t integrate and automate no one is going to buy your product anyway.”

For mobile and web alike, the proliferation of content-based marketing services is weighing on the hyperlocal ecosystem. Business owners do not have bandwidth to create content for each new platform, leaving a number of digital platforms without the merchant-supplied content necessary prove their use case. If Pontiflex can generate quality, engaging content with this new feature, it may be able to circumvent one of the biggest threats in the local space today.

Steven Jacobs is Street Fight’s deputy editor.